Mint Theater Opens 'THE WIDOWING OF MRS. HOLROYD' 2/4

The Drama Desk and Obie Award-wining Mint Theater Company (Jonathan Bank, Artistic Director) continues the 2008-2009 season with The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd by D.H. Lawrence beginning February 4th. Opening Night is set for March 1st.

Five years ago Mint Theater introduced New York audiences to D. H. Lawrence — the playwright — with their highly acclaimed production of The Daughter-in-Law, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and named one of the highlights of 2003 by The New York Times.  Audiences and critics alike were surprised to learn that Lawrence had written a play — in fact he wrote eight.  Only two were produced in his lifetime, both in small productions; Lawrence was not able to see either.  Lawrence was frustrated by his inability to find a producer willing to take a chance on him. "I believe that just as an audience was found in Russia for Chekhov, so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip 'em in.  It's the producer that is lacking, not the audience." When Mint took its chance on Lawrence, that assessment proved prophetic.  The first fifty-four performances of The Daughter-in-Law were sold-out and a run that was only scheduled to run six weeks continued for twenty. Now the Mint offers the New York Premiere of The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd.

The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd is the story of a marriage in trouble.  It is the story of a husband trying to escape the scorn and bitterness of a woman who resents the hold he has on her.  It is the story of a wife trying desperately to make a safe home for her young children amidst the coarseness of a soot-blackened coal mining village—safe from her drunken husband, from her meddling mother-in-law—and from the passion of the man who wants to take her away.

When this heart wrenching romance was presented at the Long Wharf Theater in 1973, Clive Barnes' review in The New York Times was rhapsodic: "It is perfectly possible that one of the most important playwrights of the nineteen-seventies will turn out to be a man who died in 1935.  The name is D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence—as anyone who read his novels might have guessed—was a natural playwright.  Mrs. Holroyd was written in 1914 and unsuccessfully produced in 1920.  Perhaps it was in advance of its time.  It is realistic and factual.... It hews at the playwright's past like a miner at the coalface.  In this way it has the tortured remembrances of an O'Neill.  And the language is that of a sparse and spare poet who chose prose. Mrs. Holroyd (we never learn her first name) has come to hate her husband.  He is a miner.  She is slightly better educated, and in a slightly different social class. He is an attractive man—but he drinks and goes with other women.  Another coal worker—an electrician rather than a miner—wants to take her two children away to Spain.  Lawrence is a writer of spasmodic but infinite insight.  There are times when you wonder where he is wandering. Yet there are other times, the important times, when you see that he has defined the co-existential worlds of men and women (that supreme cosmic joke) with quite surgical precision. Scalpels are wielded, blood is let, but everything is sewn up as tidily as the victim's condition will allow. This is a moving play about the tension between men and women: the essential misunderstandings and the necessary needs.  It contrasts the power of sexuality with the power of peace. And neither wins, although at the end there is some kind of compassionate understanding of two wasted lives.  It is a bold writer who tells the story of his play in the title, but Lawrence was in no way a conventional playwright.  He depicted men and women as he knew them in a background he remembered. Here it results in a domestic tragedy—small-scale but deeply etched."

For The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd, Stuart Howard directs a cast that includes Eric Martin Brown, Allyn Burrows, Julia Coffey, Nick Cordileone, Randy Danson, Dalton Harrod, Emma Kantor, Arthur Lazalde, Amanda Roberts, Sheila Stasack, James Warke, Lance Wertz, and Pilar Witherspoon. The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd will have set design by Marion Williams, costume design by Martha Hally, lighting design by Jeff Nellis and sound design by Jane Shaw.

Performances begin February 4th and continue through March 29th.  Opening Night is set for March 1st. Performances will be Tuesday through Thursday at 7PM, Friday at 8PM, Saturday at 2 PM and 8 PM and Sunday at 2 PM.  All performances will take place on the Third Floor of 311 West 43rd Street. Tickets will be $55. "25 UNDER 25" tickets, $25 for anyone under 25 years of age, are also available for all performances, subject to availability. For more information, visit www.minttheater.org or call 212-315-0231.

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